Weird A1708 Camera Issues

[NZXTInerTia]

Hello all. I'm the senior technician for a small repair company, and I have something that's stumping me.

Our customers have sent us a few A1708's that are giving the "No camera connected" error. I have tried replacing the LCD Assemblies, I have tried replacing the Logic Boards, I have installed new fresh copies of Mac OS Catalina. SMC Reset, PRAM reset, terminal commands. The works. The only thing I haven't tried is the small display connector between the Logic Board and the small thin LCD board, but I can't see how something like that would fail on multiple units in quick succession.

Is the schools pre-configured management maybe causing this, and they don't know it?

I'm stumped.

 

[NZXTInerTia]

Just bumping this again, curious if anyone has some input on what the issue may be.

 

[brianmowrey]

I don't quite see why you're leaning so heavily into the hardware. That error comes up if OS X believes the camera is in use by another app or restricted by screentime/privacy settings.

If your restarts/ PRAM resets / terminal commands "don't work" in the sense that the problem just comes back later, I would pin that on Mac OS X and whatever conferencing app or profile settings the school is using. Especially if other apps can use camera, or Facetime camera still shows in System Information> USB while the error is showing.

Which means, either the school's user profile just has a screentime/privacy setting that needs to be tweaked or your clients will have to wait until an OS update improves the closed apps still "using" the camera bug.

If you meant "don't work" as in doesn't restore camera availability at all, then my comment was useless.

 

[NZXTInerTia]

I don't quite see why you're leaning so heavily into the hardware. That error comes up if OS X believes the camera is in use by another app or restricted by screentime/privacy settings.

If your restarts/ PRAM resets / terminal commands "don't work" in the sense that the problem just comes back later, I would pin that on Mac OS X and whatever conferencing app or profile settings the school is using. Especially if other apps can use camera, or Facetime camera still shows in System Information> USB while the error is showing.

Which means, either the school's user profile just has a screentime/privacy setting that needs to be tweaked or your clients will have to wait until an OS update improves the closed apps still "using" the camera bug.

If you meant "don't work" as in doesn't restore camera availability at all, then my comment was useless.

Hey Brian, thanks for the response.

I'm not necessarily leaning into hardware, definitely since the same issue has occurred across multiple devices. I just have a lot of known-good hardware that is accessible to me, and it was easy to swap over for testing purposes.

I think we basically determined that it was something regarding the management profile for that device, or maybe some conflicting software.

I was just curious if anyone had any input before I "closed" this thread. Both here, and in my brain haha.